The calm before the Storm – Teen years.

This part of my OCD journey comes at a time where I am starting my transition from child to teenager. Life is changing, my mind and body are evolving and my priorities look different then from a few short years ago. Where I was once content playing in the backyard kicking balls and shooting nerf guns, I was now considering the prospect of moving up and on to secondary school. Still a few years off however at approximately the age of 12 or 13, I had begun to solidify my interests and personality traits.

Basketball was now my sport of passion, growing up right around the time the Toronto Raptors were declared an official NBA team. I idolized my favorite player at the time, Damon Stoudamire and wanted to be as good as him. I played on the school team and I was a pretty decent player, however I lacked the confidence and social skills many of my fellow teammates possessed. I was socially awkward, often the butt of a teammates joke or ridicule. I was introverted and shy unless I became familiar and comfortable around certain people and then I could introduce them to my silly side. While my teammates were progressing and honing their skills I was preoccupied learning social ques and conscientiously trying to not be awkward, which often made me more awkward. Rather than learning fundamentals and set drills I was focusing on how I could avoid disappointing my coaches/teammates or what the environment in the locker room was going to be like after the game. While not an issue directly related to OCD, I mention this to illustrate the level of needless analyzing I did and continue to do as an adult.

To be forthright and transparent, this blog is titled ‘calm’ before the Storm for a reason. I spent many years essentially unencumbered by the throes of my condition. My teenage years were very much fast and furious for me, coalescing into a melting pot of school studies, spending time with friends, extra curricular activities and my life long passion for gaming. I had little room for obsessing as my life was going a mile a minute, in constant flux. The few OCD memories I can recall have already been written about and all occured earlier in my childhood. And so I’ve been spending the last few days composing this blog scouring my muddied mind trying to remember any lost or suppressed memories. I can only recall one during these years and it’s quite silly in nature looking back now.

One afternoon I begrudgingly accompanied my mother to the local mall for a shopping excursion I had little say in. She would often frequent the malls and stores and was known to ‘shop until she dropped’, as the idiom goes. Boredom would often set in and I was forced to entertain myself. Eventually we found ourselves in the women’s clothing section in a department store as my mother perused the undergarments. Bored out of my skull, I found myself fixated on a particular scantily-clad manikin with curvaceous features flaunting it’s assets. Bare in mind I’m approaching puberty and emotions such as these were foreign yet strangely desirable. However something didn’t feel right. I knew this inanimate object was not reciprocating my lust and that it seemed irrational and almost predatory to feel this way towards a humanistic piece of plastic with no free will. I was stuck in a moral quandary – was I inappropriately lusting over something that didn’t approve of this behaviour? And so this was my first introduction to the subtype ‘moral’ OCD. Almost immediately upon thinking this I seeked out my mother’s reassurance. Not surprisingly her response was to decatastrophize my concerns and make me aware of how silly my internalizing was. If it’s not already painfully obvious, one must see the recurring theme of assurance seeking from my mother. She was my primary means of stress relief at the time and my only compulsive outlet that had any efficacy. While it’s a particularly strange and almost comical thing to worry about looking back, it was mostly certainly a soft landing comparitively to the ‘Storm’ that was on the horizon.

Stay tuned for my next blog where we will once again fast forward to my final years of secondary school and to the introduction to my most prominent theme of OCD – my wife.